2/14/2006 @ 12:00PM

Who Knows The Most About Money?

Bill
Gates
Bill Gates
has enough money to buy lunch for every person on Earth. If Oprah Winfrey converted her fortune into dollar bills and lined them up end to end, they’d wrap around the world five and a half times.

You can’t argue with either person’s success. But great wealth doesn’t always correspond to great understanding of money–Gates and Winfrey are successful because of other talents, not necessarily because they really grok greenbacks.

So who does know the most about money? Are economists more knowledgeable than accountants? Does a self-made millionaire know more than a trust fund baby? And who’s to say that actors, models or politicians don’t really know about the green stuff?

To answer those questions, we decided to ask people who should know–the readers and editors of Forbes.com–to vote on who knows the most about money.

We started by asking our editors and reporters to create a candidate list of two-dozen people known for their close relationship to the almighty dollar. Their candidates represented a wide swath of occupations and expertise, from International Monetary Fund Managing Director Rodrigo de Rato y Figaredo to musician, actress and “material girl” Madonna.

Then, throughout January and February, we polled Forbes.com readers, asking them to make their pick. More than 4,000 responded. We then asked senior editors at Forbes.com to vote as well. The readers’ and editors’ votes were averaged for the final ranking.

The winner,
Warren
Buffett
Warren Buffett
, won by a landslide. More than 44% of our readers chose the “Oracle of Omaha” as the man who knows the most about money.

Buffett, 74, probably won a lot of those votes for being a self-made man, and for building his $40 billion fortune from scratch. He filed his first income tax return at age 13, reporting revenue from a newspaper delivery job. Even then, he had an eye for finance, claiming a $35 deduction for his bicycle.

Over the years, Buffett became a champion of value investing, took over Salomon Brothers following the trading scandals in the late 1980s, and built his holding company,
Berkshire Hathaway
, into a behemoth. Its current market capitalization of over $135 billion makes it bigger than
AT&T
,
IBM
or
Google
. Today he’s one of the most respected financiers and market savants in the world.

Other high-ranking members of our list don’t have the same finance experience, but no one can argue that they don’t know the value of a dollar. Our fifth-place finisher, model Anna Nicole Smith, may be best known for taking off her clothes in public. An early career as an exotic dancer and Playboy centerfold certainly provided a different sort of education about the role money plays in our society. But it wasn’t until 1994 when Smith really proved she knew all about the Benjamins. The young starlet–then just 26–married 89-year-old billionaire oil magnate J. Howard Marshall. When he died just over a year later, Smith entered into a legal battle against his children for her share of Marshall’s $1.6 billion estate. The case is currently under appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Whether they’re multibillionaires or supervixens, the ten members of our list are all people who understand the nature of money, from how to get it to how to spend it. Want to see who knows the most about money? Click here to find out.